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Decolonize Black History Month

Fern Hunt at desk

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Day 12: Fern Hunt Fern Hunt earned a PhD in 1978 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciencs at New York University. Hunt also has a master’s degree from Courant and an undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr. She has taught and researched at City College of New York, the University of Utah, and Howard University. Hunt currently works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she won the Arthur S. Flemming Award for Outstanding Federal Service (2000). The isn’t the only federal position Hunt has held; she served as a consultant for the National Bureau of Standards and the National Institute of Health in the Laboratory of Mathematical Biology. Hunt’s professional interests include biomathematics, applied probability and chaos theory.
Though she is now a celebrated mathematician, Hunt admits she was not a particularly good student. For example, as an elementary school student she was placed in the “slow” classes until she made the conscious effort to improve. Even then her intellectual interests were mostly in study outside the classroom such as independent reading and using her chemistry set. Hunt found the math she learned in school to be unstimulating because it seemed to be made up of arbitrary rules. It wasn’t until she began learning algebra that she started to appreciate math as an aesthetic practice. When she was in 9th grade Hunt had a teacher named Charles Wilson. Wilson held a master’s in chemistry from Columbia University and used his classroom as a place of discovery, play, and critical thinking. It was Wilson who encouraged Hunt to apply to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and weekend program at Columbia for scientific high schoolers.
Hunt did end up attending Bronx Science but also found it to be disappointing. While her fellow students were very driven and competitive, she felt that very few were “genuinely interested in ideas.” Hunt claims that her most memorable high school courses were in the humanities. These interests in creativity and human input informed the rest of her academic and professional careers. Hunt believes that “creativity is one of the most important attributes that a scientist can have.” She encourages other mathematicians, scientists, and educators to learn the history of their field. Not only should the discovery be learned about, but the human who made the discovery is also important. Hunt is also a proponent of creative problem solving and using teaching techniques such as the Socratic method and call-and-response in order to assist her students in thinking critically.